I still have some work to do to this site, the HumX, and to Big Jelly, but I’m pretty pleased with my migrations. Drupal served me well for a long time, but WordPress seems to be much more advanced — at least for my purposes. Yes, WP has its quirks, but in the big picture, it is just a better platform. Besides, it seems to have many more professional designers working for it.

I’ve been looking for days, and I have yet to find a viable solution to move my Drupal site(s) to WordPress. Why? The links on WordPress’ web site are very old; Google search comes up with several promising hits, but nothing that pans out. They’re either old, or too complicated.

I’m moving to WordPress for ease and speed. I like Drupal quite a bit, but it is a real chore to update. Module porting to newer versions is slow with Drupal, or sometimes just doesn’t happen. Most Drupal themes are awful. WordPress just seems much more friendly for my needs. It’s fast and responsive. I plan to move LitMUSE and HumX to WordPress, too.

This Drupal issue aside, I had much luck porting all of my old Movable Type stuff to WordPress. It was almost too easy. It should be here soon, along with comments.

Now, I have to move those comments to Disqus. This will probably be pretty painless. However, I’m as optimistic about moving them from my Drupal install. We’ll see soon.

With the help of Ron Jerome‘s Bibliography module for Drupal, I’m beginning to really geek-out on my professional web site. Instead of a list of works that I have cited on this blog, I can how have individual entries for every work I cite (like the one for Sterling’s new book), and a complete bibliography of entries. It still has some issues — like not having a place for page numbers when citing a journal article, or not being able to use SmartyPants — but it is an excellent module for researchers. This is the coolest thing for academics who use Drupal since Norton came out with their new Western Literature anthologies — maybe cooler! Can you feel the excitement? Thanks, Ron.

I’m very proud of my recent work on the Humanities web site. I designed it a couple of years ago, and since the college just updated their site, I figured ours needed to be better.

I updated the software to Drupal, ditching the difficult-to-use GeekLog. The new 4.7.2 version of Drupal adds some excellent features, like the ability to name URLs. The design is based on Ken Collins’ Meta Theme; I changed the masthead images, but it is essentially just as he made it. This theme is so well done, that it alone might convince all CMS users to switch to Drupal.

I plan to devote some more time to finishing the site this summer, and some time in the fall to train the faculty on how to use it. I’m happy to be excited about our web site again.